CenterPoint Energy’s Energy Safe Skills program readies future workforce for success

Collaboration with National Energy Foundation promotes secondary and vocational energy safety education  

Evansville, Ind. – Feb. 5, 2024 – CenterPoint Energy is continuing its years-long collaboration with the National Energy Foundation (NEF) to promote the Energy Safe Skills program, an energy safety education program for secondary, vocational and college students.  

  

“The goal of this program is to provide safe digging education to those individuals who are on the cusp of joining the construction, engineering and maintenance industries,” said Shane Alexander, Director of Damage Prevention and Public Awareness at CenterPoint Energy. “Understanding how to safely design, plan and work around buried utilities is critical to these students’ personal safety on the job and their success in their future careers.” 

  

Available at no cost, this training includes an interactive presentation, student quiz and supplementary STEM-based activities that can be completed within one or two classroom sessions. The curriculum covers characteristics of natural gas, natural gas leak recognition and response, the importance of contacting 811 and safe digging best practices. 

 

“The biggest benefit of this program for teachers is the interactive presentation and quiz are self-guided, which makes it easy to incorporate into a lesson plan regardless of the instructor’s previous experience with the topics,” said Kelly Flowers, Senior Program Director at NEF. “We have designed this training so the instructors can simply play the self-guided training for their students, or they can be more active in leading the discussion.”